Paul Campos on dual loyalties, Israel and Omar
March 10, 2019
He sez:
Read the whole, etc. While I think he has good points, esp about fetishization of the state, the acknowledgment that we have biases doesn't remove the obligation to confront and control those biases, to the extent we can and acknowledging our limits. The issue runs both ways - anti-Semitism has woken from near death with the rise of conservative nationalism, while the left has an obvious point at how biased American foreign policy is toward Israeli right-wing government positions and against Palestinians.
My great-grandparents and their parents emigrated from Austria-Hungary to the US in 1910. My understanding is that German-Americans disproportionately opposed American entry into World War I. It's lost to time whether my relatives took part in those politics, but the German-American bias is worth acknowledging. It's not necessarily wrong - maybe we'd have fewer wars if people cared about the lives of family relatives in the opposing military trench. It does however complicate things.
I hope we can get a somewhat-more balanced perspective on Israel (given everything global, I favor a somewhat pro-Israel stance for the US) while confronting anti-Semitism and other biases wherever they arise.
....This whole sordid mess is a product of, among other things, the insidious idea that it’s undesirable for people to have “dual loyalties” in the context of their relationships to nation-states. This idea is obviously absurd if stated as a straightforward proposition, which is why it almost never is.
People have multiple loyalties in every other aspect of their lives, so why wouldn’t or shouldn’t they in the context of their relationships with nations? I’m not Jewish, but I think it’s completely ridiculous to criticize American Jews for feeling various levels of affection toward, passion for, and loyalty to, the state of Israel....
The accusation of dual loyalty, in other words, is based on a completely bogus theory of both human psychology and political morality. And yes, I realize “dual loyalty” is a classic anti-Semitic trope, but that accusation only has bite because of a perverted concept of patriotism, which requires loyalty to the present government of the nation of which one is a citizen to always trump every other consideration. In other words, “dual loyalty” is only bad per se if one accepts the essentially fascist concept of loyalty to a single nation state as the first duty of every citizen of the State.
Read the whole, etc. While I think he has good points, esp about fetishization of the state, the acknowledgment that we have biases doesn't remove the obligation to confront and control those biases, to the extent we can and acknowledging our limits. The issue runs both ways - anti-Semitism has woken from near death with the rise of conservative nationalism, while the left has an obvious point at how biased American foreign policy is toward Israeli right-wing government positions and against Palestinians.
My great-grandparents and their parents emigrated from Austria-Hungary to the US in 1910. My understanding is that German-Americans disproportionately opposed American entry into World War I. It's lost to time whether my relatives took part in those politics, but the German-American bias is worth acknowledging. It's not necessarily wrong - maybe we'd have fewer wars if people cared about the lives of family relatives in the opposing military trench. It does however complicate things.
I hope we can get a somewhat-more balanced perspective on Israel (given everything global, I favor a somewhat pro-Israel stance for the US) while confronting anti-Semitism and other biases wherever they arise.
